skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think that 7 and 8 are actually saying the same thing. #7 is saying that structuring your data correctly is optimization, and #8 is directly telling you to structure your data well.
Ah thanks, I misunderstood which part was being called in to question.
Take a pinch of salt - you've crossed the first barrier - you're looking at something people want.

Ask the magic question - 'Will you pay $X for this per month?' That differentiates ppl who find it 'nice' vs people who are desperate for it. This will also give you baseline pricing. Pitch it high and come low. If you think it's worth $100/m, start asking at $250/m.

What's an interesting revenue number for you from this? Say it's $10000. Say your price is $50/m [Are your customers ready to pay this much?]. Then you need 200 customers. Is the market big enough to support that? Can you reach this many customers?

Meanwhile, do the pipeline research. What do people look for when they want this product? What search terms do they use? Use Adwords Explorer to find out how many people in which region are searching for this - https://adwords.google.com/o/Targeting/Explorer . See how many competitors exist in this space, are they easy to find, are they targeting the right keywords [semrush.com]

If everything is positive, create a landing page, start doing some basic SEO or even SEM [if the price is low enough], to get signups, and if you're up to it, pre-orders.

Then build the product :)

P.S. I've done bits and pieces of this before - not done all the way. If you want to chat abt this, I'm prasanna 79 at google's email service.

P.P.S. I'm surprised this is not on the front page. I'd have thought this is clearly the most pertinent of HN material.
(Shameless plug) I just wrote about this very thing on Friday: http://mattdeboard.net/2012/10/05/larry-the-software-guy/

Not my best writing ever but that round's already downrange. Plus there's an excellent response from Alex Feinberg in the comments.
I think you've accurately identified why you could have those gaps. Not that you do have them, but hourly billing enterprise software "scut work" doesn't require a whole lot of CS. I wonder if the stuff on the other side of those APIs did?
Yes, well, the US government can hardly be blamed for not being concerned about its own influence.
Programming is a tool to solve a problem.

Focus on hard problems and you will end up using and developing the right tools to solve them. By focusing on hard problems, you will naturally stay up-to-date with companies looking for your expertise.
Its interesting that the article was purely observational and most of the HN comments are highly technical or individual app UI oriented. I agree most app UIs are awful and none are consistent with other apps.

One point not mentioned is the Meta issues. I've got one main screen 4x4 icons and 5 total screens and I do a heck of a lot more with my phone than read one site's news. I do not have the screen space for an app for every website I've ever visited plus all the base load of apps (runkeeper, doggcatcher, kindle app, a dozen or so others). So a "bookmark" app needs to be important enough for me to delete another app or spend a long time scrolling the list to find it. The browser, on the other hand, is always and easily available.

The other issue is I have limited memory on my phone. Some people do not. But for some of us, its a constant battle to remove stuff. To install "really big app thats basically a incredibly bloated bookmark" I need to delete something else. Will it be runkeeper? Will it be doggcatcher? Don't think so.

Finally some apps have a smell about them. Go to "manage apps" "Running" and why, oh why, is my bank app running? To screw me over I assume, or waste my battery, or spy on me? After enough "problems" like this I distrust apps. Why does "tune in radio pro" waste ram and battery and probably do something nefarious by running 24x7? I can justify dropbox syncing in the background. I can justify doggcatcher polling my favorite podcasts periodically in the background. Why is google googles running 24x7, how does that benefit me? I mean benefit in reality, not marketing speak? This mis-behavior gives apps in general an icky repellent smell. If I install this app, how much battery life and privacy am I giving up?

Reminds me of the old days when people used to buy retail software, so to "gain market share" you would have giant boxes on the shelf with a tiny little CD and one sheet of paper inside the mostly empty box... literally push the competition right off the shelf... In the modern era a site is so desperate they need to use the same strategy on my phone, that site probably is not worth visiting, if it had value it wouldn't depend on dirty tricks to gain market share.
"My point: the experiment has been run before."

And as long as there are new generations that want to spend their free time with such an experiment, history will repeat itself. Not to mention experiencing it in a new medium (heh, play-by-mail) and taking it to another scale. Hell, our alliance has it's own custom authentication application that strings together dozens of various applications that serve our coalition. We have a small team of system admins that run our services. A single jabber broadcast for a fleet reaches thousands of members instantly, followed by a flurry on logins to the game server.

As far as the "initial experience" being terrible, I completely agree with you on that one. CCP have put a lot of effort into improving the new player experience but it's still extremely lacking and I honestly don't think this will ever change.

I also admit choosing "war simulator" may not of been the best phrase. You're right, it's a simulator of something, but when you are in a science fiction setting where spaceship pilots are immortal, it's never going to represent any war we are familiar with. You're wrong about it not being interesting though, if it wasn't interesting, thousands of us wouldn't log in at one time to take part in a battle over a bunch of pixels.

In regard to your comment about it not being sold as a "social experiment", you'd be surprised. CCP went in that direction with their marketing material for a few years:

"The Butterfly Effect" - http://youtu.be/08hmqyejCYU

"Causality" - http://youtu.be/uGplrpWvz0I

"I Was There" - http://youtu.be/OSxSyv4LC1c

I'm stop posting about EVE now. I fear about coming across as overly defensive about the game, when that isn't really my intention.
Sequential Maps of Europe from Year 1 to 2000 at the end of each century
One Linux for all ARM systems
Highly recommend this free online course given by Robert Sedgewick from Princeton.

https://class.coursera.org/algs4partI-2012-001/lecture/index

He covers all the questions in this, except the last one regarding graphs.
Keys to brainstorming personalities
I think the biggest problem is that early exits make you forget you have to clean things up before returning (a bigger problem in C and sometimes Java, than it is in modern dynamic languages). There are certainly other reasons, but I'll leave them to others that are more experienced!
Now I see why companies mentioned in hover text have minor problems in Europe: Fac€book, Googl€, Appl€...
Whilst I agree with you on being self-taught and knowing those answers I will say that I finally went and got an MSc in Computer Science after 12 years working professionally as a developer and being self-taught.

Part of the reason was to find out what I didn't know.

What I didn't know was basically some parts of set theory and quite a chunk of automata theory.

I did find cperciva's questions to be trivial, but I wouldn't say that makes them trivial. A TV quiz once said, "It's easy when you know the answer.".

Algorithms for someone else might be what automata theory was to me.
On Windows, the Visual Impairment Simulator ( http://vis.cita.uiuc.edu/) is even better.

It allows not just grayscale viewing, but colourblindness of different forms, and other visual impairement. Really fascinating. Runs for your whole computer, so you can test apps and other stuff too.
So What If Tech Start-Ups Are Small? Their Job-Creation Impact Is Big
I see that you're the author. Thanks for replying!

> Sure, there's plenty of software development which doesn't involve fancy algorithms or data structures... avoiding computer architecture, operating systems, mathematics, networking, databases, and distributed systems as well is a bit harder.

This is at odds with the statement in your article that jumped out at me:

"If you can't answer the majority of the questions on these four papers, and you're working or intend to work as a software developer, you should ask yourself why--"

I disagree, and furthermore, adding more topics means that your assertion is going to be less accurate.

Of course, it's better to know more, and I'm glad to have a computer science degree. However, I think that conflating having a computer science background and general software development is confirmation bias. I don't have data to back me up, but I believe that it's more common to simply not need to know what a bipartite graph is, or even a majority set of these topics. Given the theoretical grounding of the question in your first block, I'm guessing that parts 2-4 will be similarly structured.

Computer science is one slice of software development. Software development is a huge, deep field. A software development exam could just as easily contain an exam including the following topics: communicating effectively through email, distilling requirements from customers, writing meaningful commit messages, testing theory, or hundreds of other non-theoretical topics.

What I'm trying to say is that your exam is a good reminder of computer science at the root of many of the fields of knowledge in software, and is fun, but it's not representative of software development. In a given year, most software developers are going to spend more time puzzling through garden-variety implementation bugs than thinking about any two of the questions you list. Which is why they're not "lucky". :)
Apple doesn't allow third party browsers using their own renderers in their iOS devices.
I meant that I can't see anything wrong with the joke. :)
As always, google is our friend. Some links:

http://www.osdata.com/programming/loops/earlyexit.html

http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/118703/where-...
I don't think there will be a wholesale replacement of AAA game engines with JS-based engines, but I do think JS-based engines will encroach more and more on AAA territory from the bottom up, as the visual-fidelity differences between AAA games and web/mobile/etc. games narrow. I know of at least one AAA-level game company that's working in-house on a WebGL-based game engine to hedge their bets, and currently debating what should be deployed on that platform. I would guess others are looking into it as well.
Time is a factor in understanding almost any complicated concept but its far from the main reason.

I think schools (or atleast the schools I was exposed to) have always focused on solving theoretical puzzles without much context or understanding of how it would be applied.

If more time was spent on understanding concepts and less time mindlessly applying recipes and equations, perhaps learning math wouldn't be so difficult.
The VIC-II "steals" CPU cycles every 8th scan line in order to load sprite & color data, what C64 folks call "bad lines". It has a BA (Bus Available) pin that's fed into the address decoder PLA. When BA is low, the PLA tells the CPU that memory is only available for writing.

If you disable the VIC-II's output with a poke, it doesn't need any "bad lines" to fetch data. The CPU then gets 25 scan lines' worth of time to crunch data each screen refresh.
I agree, you'll only know the answer if you've taken the time to learn about the specific concepts being tested.

I suppose what I'm surprised about is that a large number of developers haven't taken the time to learn (or have since forgotten) the theory around these particular concepts.
How do you "figure out" what a B-tree is? That's a trivia question.
Wasn't Huawei created by China because they thought Cisco equipment was a security risk because it had backdoors for US govt agencies?
> "If Huawei has indeed acted in bad faith, then make their actions public so other nations/institutions avoid them"

What if laying out the evidence implicitly compromises the only window into Huawei's alleged operations? Is it more important to try and win the public over, or to keep your advantage?

And would/could the public even be convinced? How many times has the US government warned about the security risks of partnerships with Chinese firms? How many cautionary tales do we have/need? After Boeing, Google, et al were very publicly compromised and all leaked data pointed to Beijing ... the evidence was all but dismissed by those with a direct financial incentive to ignore it.

Why would another round of that be of any use?
"Save For Web" has the exact same problem and makes no difference unless the user is proactive and adjusts settings, the defaults are just as bad as the regular "save as".

When doing "Save For Web" Photoshop disables subsampling for Maximum and High (the default) and also does not enable progressive by default. It also adds meta.
How to Create Your Own Good Luck
Epic level spell?
I Want It All and I Want It Right Now
They don't have a monopoly to abuse.
Apple using their strength in the phone market to gain an advantage in the maps market?
I am usually very weary of this kind of "science for the general public" articles. We all know how the "computer science for the general public" articles sound like – I usually doubt whether I would get an accurate picture after reading them, if I didn't have a technical background in CS.
Since I don't know anything about advanced physics myself, I will not indulge in any "ah, I see" kind of reaction after reading this article.

E.g.: I have no idea how accurate my interpretation of the phrase "quantum ether" is; it's like an empty container, and as a non-specialist I could put lots of non-sense in it.
This is silly.

Microsoft was a monopoly with 98% of the OS market who was trying to use that monopoly to force their competitors out of business.

Remind me again, what company am I supposed to believe is doing that today? Near 100% market share and uncompetitive practices?

This comic seems like the opposite of http://xkcd.com/774/ - it's trendy to ignore the abuses of Microsoft in the 90s, or to paint some false equivalency that allows you to just ignore stuff.
The Incredible Growth Hacks Of Quora and StackOverflow To Target Early Adopters
Oh, now I get it. When reading #7 I got the impression that you were dismissing the so called micro-optimization - something along the lines of "ship early, fix things later. Don't get stuck over-engineering and delaying writing code".
The Future of Universities: Everything a MOOC is NOT
> Jane goes to a party but doesn't want anyone who wasn't there to know.

It's unnecessary to present this as a problem of social media. In fact anyone with a camera will present a problem to Jane, as they can make photos and show them to anyone, in real life. At least in the case of social media there are some technical solutions to limit that, but you can't go preventing arbitrary people from accidentally divulging that you were at some party.

Perhaps social media do amplify this situation because the information is more readily concentrated and reproduced, but the fundamental problem you present is the expectation of being able to control information when it can't be.
Those who are interested in this subject and want to discuss it, you may be interested in seeing the points - good and bad - that have been made on previous occasions that this has been submitted. Here are a few previous discussion:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=232192 (indiangeek.net) 75 points 4 years ago 33 comments

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=554338 (indiangeek.net) 83 points 3 years ago 33 comments

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1022394 (indiangeek.net) 67 points 2 years ago 40 comments

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1949915 (starling-software.com) 155 points 1 year ago 106 comments

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2823912 (indiangeek.net) 12 points 1 year ago 1 comments

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3434350 (starling-software.com) 2 points 9 months ago 0 comments

Discussions like this can be of value, and no doubt some of the newer people on HN may have points to add. OTOH, many points will already have been made, so seeing the past discussions may be of benefit.
I'm not sure if I would agree on this. Take for example the Linux kernel. You have basically early exits just everywhere. Take any random file from here: http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stabl...

It often goes like this:

check if we have already done this or so -> exit
check if this is possible to do. if not -> exit
do some first thing. on error -> exit
do some other thing. on error -> exit
...
i kind of like it! but i dont really know what to use it for?
For what it's worth, Rosen's introductory text on discrete mathematics is pretty good as well. (This sort of math crops up all the time in formal CS, for those of you who might otherwise wonder wtf discrete has to do with anything.)
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_i_0_13?url=search-alias...
(The study guide that is available to go with it is worth the money, imho.)

The Graham, Knuth, Patashnik book on concrete mathematics (a bit of a play on words for continuous and discrete) is a quality work as well but written to a considerably higher level that may or may not be pleasant to contend with depending on the reader's background.
http://www.amazon.com/Concrete-Mathematics-Foundation-Comput...
It’s time for patent trolls to bear the costs of frivolous lawsuits
You need a partner, or funding to hire a team, or both.

Without the technical abilities, all you have is an idea that you're unable to execute on. Valuation of ideas can vary, but no one here will argue that execution matters less.

It might be possible that your idea is adequately novel that it can wait six months or a year for you to develop the technical skills yourself. Actually, I've found that ideas from people who lack the technical skills to build them often need to wait because the underlying tech/infrastructure/market doesn't exist yet. This is especially true for ideas that generate big enthusiasm.

Also, you will want to be in California, if you continue to work at your day job while thinking about this project. Someone please correct me if there are any other US states with clear company-time delineators.
The original is here: http://www.indiangeek.net/wp-content/uploads/Programmer%20co...
What advantage do they have in the maps market?
> He is facing sexual assault charges

No, he is not, he's wanted for "questioning", no charges have been filed. And extradition for questioning, on allegations that seem very flimsy, is excessive to the point of making me doubt prosecutors' honesty.

All the weird things that happened around TPB trial before (chief investigator getting employed by the plaintiffs, judge being a member of pro-copyright association, another judge with speaking appointments for a different pro-copyright organization) don't help the way I view the Swedish justice system.

I'm no fan of Wikileaks, they have lost their way a long time ago and I don't think revealing the cables, or the video was particularly noble or furthered any noble causes. But it's also pretty clear to me that the guy is not being treated fairly, and probably won't be once extradited.
How Soon Will I See Health Benefits If I Quit Smoking?
There's been a variety of papers using MRI scans to show the brain restructuring itself during learning. This takes time. Mathematics and CS deal with abstraction upon abstraction, as well as counter-intuitive systems (negative numbers, unreal numbers, infinity just as a start), both of which I would suspect require more intense rewiring. I've taught CS to English grads, and entire classes can be spent trying to establish a single, simple (to me) concept.

But theresdefinitely more effective techniques than just exposure and time. Finding the smallest new knowledge beyond the students current (ie one thing at a time) can make a big difference. As does finding the right metaphor from within their current concepts, when adding a new one. But such things are harder to scale, being student centric, and most educations rely on some amount of scaling
Language learning makes the brain grow, Swedish study suggests
I hear another very interesting application of topology was in human psychology, by the famous Kurt Lewin. He wrote a book, "Principles of Topological Psychology"; I haven't read it yet, but it sounds very interesting.
That is legal for non-monopolies.
This is clearly not my domain, so I am sure I am missing something, but how is this different from creating, say, a Wufoo form to prompt users to enter information that you need?
(WuFoo seems to be $0.05 per entry)
I think that the news article is a result of the Sixty Minutes Episode that aired yesterday on Huawei. The points I got from their report were:

1. Huawei (like many Chinese companies) works in close partnership with the Chinese government, which has subsidized many of its processes.

2. Huawei may be stealing IP from U.S. based companies

3. The U.S. is totally reliant on foreign companies for swaths of our communications infrastructure (which would be unsettling to a Congressional committee)

4. Then again, just because U.S. companies and the government were asleep at the wheel when it came to these technologies, does that mean we get to be choosy beggars? Is Huawei a threat to security or just a threat to the economy?
How do I access this course?

The website says: "Enrollment is Closed"
ShowHN: UPnpLOAD - Dead simple file upload through UPnP routers
At least so far, this one's weaker because it's just a nonbinding advisory opinion about Huawei and ZTE, while the windfarm case was an actual block of a private-sector transaction.

The report here warns federal government procurement offices to avoid purchasing Huawei and ZTE equipment, and also recommends that private-sector companies avoid doing so. But the second recommendation has no teeth at all, and even the first part isn't strictly binding on the executive branch's procurement policies (it's not an actual passed bill, just a report issued by a committee).
/usr/local on a normal, stock OS X install is completely unused. Homebrew's installer commandeers it by `chown`ing it to the current user and makes it group writable, as to cut down on the sudo noise. I think issues like this, and the fact that nearly all package managers, including aptitude, yum and ports require sudo should be catalysts for requiring sudo for updating and installation of packages. It's that whole security vs. convenience tradeoff again.

I've actually run into a similar issue with another installer via a Rakefile that lacked uninstalling capabilities and a confusing method of determining the $PREFIX which resulted in me shredding my /usr/local/bin directory for a couple seconds before my ^C spamming stopped the process.
There are plenty of things a "great" engineer does differently, but to be "as successful" as those you've cited, you need more than that. There are 1.5M software engineers in the U.S. Your examples are probably in the top 1000--that's the top 0.1 percent (i.e. 0.001 of the total). To get there you need high cognitive capacity, hard work, and an extreme amount of luck. That said, you can increase your luck my examining macrotrends in the industry.

But what do I know--I'm not as successful as those guys, nor is anyone posting here, so we're all just pontificating because we like to hear ourselves talk. Don't lean too much on advice from anyone less successful (or as successful) than you.
no charges have been filed

That's just an artifact of the terminology used by the Swedish legal system. Charges cannot be filed in absentia in Sweden. The act of formally charging someone comes after questioning and must be done with the person present.